CIO guru extraordinaire

After a decade of teaching life-work balance twice a year at CHIME's CIO Boot Camp, Tim Zoph has handed the charge to Branzell, but he's pleased that he's had the opportunity to influence nearly a thousand young leaders over the years.

In his view, you can't be a good leader without it.

Zoph was CIO at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago for more than 20 years, managing an IT team of 300 people. Today he serves as Senior Vice President, Administration for Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, with management responsibility for the Facility Design and Construction team and Enterprise Project Management Office. He has a smaller team: 35 people, and he also works with a virtual team of architects and construction leaders.

For three years, Zoph had overlapping responsibilities for the two positions – IT as well as facility design and construction. He only recently has been able to focus solely on his new position, one that he appreciates.

"It was important to me to make a contribution, but also to step aside and let others lead," he said. "It gives me another dimension on which to act on a changing healthcare system."

Even 10 years ago, Zoph began to observe and experience the mounting demands being made of CIOs, and the accompanying stress.

The industry then  – and more so now,  "is significantly experiencing what I call really disruptive change," he said. "Technology now is really becoming even more important in order to take hold of that future. That's everything from consumer expectations to delivery model change to new methodologies. With that growing responsibility and demand on leadership, CIOs are continually more stressed with their roles," he said.

What Zoph also observed was reluctance on the part of young CIOs to think about taking on additional responsibility because the work-life balance, even in their current roles, had become challenging.

That observation is what led him to develop a work-life balance module for the CHIME Boot Camp.

As Zoph conceived it, the session "would be a way to give perspective and tools and confidence to young leaders who were worried that taking on more responsibility would further erode what they wanted out of their own lives."

In developing the class, Zoph came to grasp better than he ever had before that having a balanced life was a catalyst to authentic leadership.

"In order to be a person that you would want to work for, have people work for you, it's really important that you demonstrate that you have your life in order, have your priorities straight and that you recognize that it's important that you have to step away from work as your sole purpose in life and make it clear to others that that's important to you."

This is something that Zoph practices in his own life.

It was not innate.

"I had to discover it," he said, "and I wish I had discovered it earlier in life."

"It happens particularly early in the career that you have to throw 100 percent of who you are into your career in order to be the person that you want to be," he said. "Oftentimes you don't really realize it until there are other dimensions in your life that begin to erode away."

Because he found his own life-work balance later in his career, Zoph realized it was important to introduce it to leadership development at an earlier stage to give people tools they needed to make good decisions about balance.

He didn't want up-and-coming leaders to "all of a sudden wake up one morning and say, 'where'd my life go,' or 'I don't want this job anymore,' or 'I don't want to assume leadership,' or 'why is it that people who are working for me are not happy?'"

When CIOs or aspiring CIOs came to Zoph's boot camp, they were asked, "What would you do with an extra day of your life?"

"We wrote it down, and I would catalogue it, and get people to think about it right away," he said.

At the close of boot camp, Zoph wrote the class a letter, which was paralleling all these things that were important to them in their life. Then he summed up the lessons taught at boot camp. The goal was to get them to think about the experience as a way to refresh their skills, but also as a way to refresh what was important to them.

"We brought it full circle from beginning to end and really integrated this whole concept of life balance as a means or pathway to authentic leadership," he said.

The sessions closed with the question, "How are you going to recommit your career around what you've learned this week?"

"We found that people took a lot out of boot camp, there are a lot of leadership lessons," Zoph said. "Often, after this module and time to think about it, there was really a recommitment to step away and really understand what was important to them, and really seek life balance because, as you might expect, there was a lot of concern around the room about whether or not they really had their careers and the rest of life in order."

But, the workload doesn't go away

The load doesn't go away, Zoph acknowledged. "It's just how you approach the stress of it. Actually, it's really healthy to step away, and what happens if you fire on all cylinders you have greater capacity for all aspects of your life, including your work."

As Zoph sees it, productivity is more than a function of time. It's about clarity and focus and approach. "Unless you really get that," he said, "no amount of effort is going to solve that problem of work and stress. You are a better leader and more productive person if in fact you are altogether."

Zoph is a believer in transparency. He keeps just one calendar on which he keeps track of family and health and recreation commitments as well as work appointments, and he makes it available for all to see.

"I put them equally up there with and manage them with things that may be demands of my work, and I don't let the work side corrode what's important to me personally," he said.

"That sends a really strong message because I'm managing my whole life on a week-to week basis and not letting small erosions take it away. People can see it. If I let people know that I'm taking time away to go work out, or whatever it may be. That's just one example."

Zoph's advice: "Put your life on display and be comfortable with it. Let people know where those priorities begin and end. That's OK. People by and large respond to the values that are important to you."

For Zoph, as for others, this type of work is always a work in progress.

For him, his own work on balance has translated into a leadership style that he is proud of.

"I go public with things that are important to me outside of work," he said. "I'm respectful and encouraging of people to have a more complete journey and destination."

In his view balance will become even more critical in the years ahead.

"If you have those tools in place," he said, "it will give you the opportunity to ride out the stress, the change, the transition that are surely ahead."

Branzell does not see the demand on IT teams easing.

"I don't see the workload getting any smaller anytime soon. I think what it's going to force us to do, because I think the funding is going to at best remain flat – at worse shrink – it's going to force not only those leaders, but all organizations to prioritize really what they're going to work on – what's got the most value."

"If that is the outcome of all this, I think it will actually be a healthy exercise. Instead of doing everything OK, we need to prioritize everything really well."